


The Love That You've Lent Me

by FrostbitePanda



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Filler, Gen, Missing Scene, One-Shot, Pain and Healing, Podfic Welcome, Some Green Place Imagery, Some The Dag Backstory, The "My Name Is Max" Scene, fluff-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-04-11 14:44:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4439846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrostbitePanda/pseuds/FrostbitePanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because he knows he cannot stay. He cannot be in a Green Place. He is a dust devil, a hellion, a feral thing bound to heaping dunes and ochre cliffs and the old Vuvalini is cheering from the driver’s seat upon the first glimpse of the Citadel swimming on the horizon. But he thinks that maybe he could stay in this car with her just a while longer. </p><p>(The Missing Scene, so-to-speak.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Love That You've Lent Me

_Lay her down, lay her down, get in the car, get her flat, lay her down._

His arms tighten around her, careful of the wound in her side. _She’s hurt, she’s hurt real bad._ The words burn through him, a lip of fire over his heart. His mind is coming apart at the edges, vision sinking, narrowing to nothing but her and the car. He manages a glance to the others, boarding the vehicle, unharmed, breathing in and out. _Get in the car, lay her down, lay her down. Careful, careful._

He is fully sitting, her weight heavy against his chest. He thinks he hears her say “home,” but he has to be imagining it. Imagining her being whole and unhurt and speaking to him of a future she could hold in her hand and share with him like a warm fire.

He plants his feet flat on the floor and pushes, taking them both backward into the main cab. By some sheer fucking luck that almost has him dizzy with relief, they seem to have commandeered a medical vehicle of some sort. Makes sense that the frail old bastard would want healing agents at his immediate disposal.

He lifts her up to lay her on the makeshift examining table, but he stops when he hears her sharp breath, edged with agony. He is not sure what he is doing, can’t possibly think about it, but he is making shushing noises he thought he had long ago forgotten. He is murmuring “Hey, hey, you’re okay,” into the shell of her ear like a spell.

Cheedo has emerged next to him, eyes wide with fear, unable to speak. From behind him he hears the one he thinks they call ‘Toast’ ask, “Is she okay?”

He can’t answer her, because he honestly can’t be sure and he’s fucking terrified. They’re looking to him like he can do something about this, like he can save their savior, and it makes him want to kick and claw his way across the desert until he is sure her ghost will never find him.

“Help me,” he manages to rasp. His throat is burning like he had just screamed for days, knelt on a dune, desolate and wrecked with grief. Cheedo brushes her palm over Furiosa’s jaw and she weakly raises her head, smiles crookedly, before her neck goes slack and the back of her skull is rolling along his collarbone. “No no no no,” he chants under his breath.

He lifts himself up, bringing her with him, and, with a quick swing of his arm under her knees and Cheedo bringing her feet onto the table, they lay her flat. He crawls over her gently, careful not to jostle, and settles on her other side so the women can have room enough to enter.

Dag settles next to him, a shaky, pale thing. The others find places beside the dead god-king and their sister who had been stolen away, now returned, in the front seat. The two remaining Vuvalini _(only two?_ ) stay on the edges of the scene, but all eyes and hopes are pinned to _her_.

His mouth is impossibly dry. He tries to swallow his swiftly rising panic, but it only catches in his throat and makes him cough. His eyes rake over her, watching as the color fades from her skin, as her left eyelid blooming purple. He takes her wrist, feeling her pulse. Weak, but real and beating and pushing life through her. He doesn’t let go.

“We should stop. Get _him_ out of here, get her bound up.”

For one wild moment, he thinks the girl, Toast, is talking about getting him out. Getting him out of here so they could drive home and not worry about a feral animal snapping at their heels.

But she kicks the mass of flesh next to her to illustrate her point and he is suddenly grounded, the haze of panic breaking with the promise of something to do.

He holds his hand out to Dag, who takes it tentatively, and guides her fingers to the vein in Furiosa’s wrist that ties her to life. “Don’t let go. Shout if it changes.” She nods mutely, looking scared, but resolute.

He shifts away, feeling cold and clumsy without her heat to hold him to the earth.

+++

She dreams of the Green Place.

The sun kisses her skin in warmth, sinking into the ground and spilling marrow-red over the earth. There is black silt under her feet, spangled with mica, and there is water kneading her thighs, spreading cool and sweet around her like a potion. She unfolds her arms, feeling small and whole all the same, and watches as the flesh palm of her left hand turns up to the sky to hold the waning sunlight.

She remembers breathing once, distantly now, the air stinging her nostrils with diesel, words dying on her cracked lips _“home… get them…home...”_. She thinks her fool held her then, big palms sealed over her neck and skull, his eyes too full, the grief and panic spilling out and onto her.

But she had slipped from the drum of engines and the hum of dust and into the Green Place and she thinks that maybe she is dead, but that’s okay. Her fool will get them home, even if she couldn’t, and she lays her head in a web of kelp, breathing petrichor and sweet-rot.

The water dries up, pulling the earth with it, cracking and peeling like paint. The heat of it ignites through her veins and spreads her open, nerves firing all at once. She is entirely too alive, rising from the loam and sinking into cold metal and roughly callused palms . The dappled green splinters into white steel, orange light and her breath pulls rough through her, heated and haggard and agonizing, but she feels so painfully full and alive as she blinks away soft-edged shadows from her eyes.

All she can see is gray-green, crinkled iris edging blown pupils. She feels the rasp of thumbs on her cheeks, and she watches as his lips part, breath escaping like the trapped thing it had been. His brow is wrinkled with lines of worry. “Hey.” The word is a prayer, thrown to the heavens for whoever was listening.

She lifts her right hand, curling it over his wrist. She doesn’t know how she came to be here. How she is looking into his eyes with oxygen exchanging in her burnt lungs and blood thundering in her heart, but she knows he is the one who brought her here.

“Hey,” she croaks and she thinks that his face may actually break with relief, simply crushed under the weight of it. He ducks his head, pushing his forehead to her own, so firmly she thinks he may bruise her, but she doesn’t mind.

The Wives erupt with adulation, greeting her as if she had gone missing for days before limping back to them with bashful, shrugging shoulders. The fool leans back so they may touch her, whispering their thanks and exultations, that she will be taking them home.

She feels a bite of a needle in the crook of her elbow. She starts, frightened for a moment, looking at the red line glowing, stretching from her to him. She catches his eyes in her own and she is simply trapped by what she now understands.

“Max gave you his blood. Well, actually, he is still giving you his blood.” Dag provides.

“Should probably stop, boy, you’ll dry yourself right out.” Vyrie admonishes from behind him.

“Yeah, Max, it’s all right now, she’s up!” Cheedo chirps delightedly.

“His name is Max,” Capable explains.

“Max,” Furiosa breathes, eyes still aligned with his, testing it like a spell. He nods. “Thank you, Max.”

He doesn’t move, eyes lighted with a hopeless terror. As if he was convinced, somehow, that he had slipped into a fever dream and his eyes simply refused to relinquish their hold on her. He clears his throat, like he may say something, but nothing comes of it, only the click of his tongue over dry lips.

“Let her rest girls, still a long ride home,” Forthright calls from the driver seat.

“How far out are we?” Furiosa asks, breaking her eyes away. Max shifts uncomfortably, hands floating around along the lines of her arms, not knowing where they belonged.

“'Bout nine hours," he replies, voice a tumble of stone and gravel.

The Wives eventually drift away one by one, settling down for sleep. Dag moves forward and presses her lips to Max's cheek. He jumps as if electrocuted and Dag laughs and Furiosa feels her own mouth curl ever so slightly.

A new-forged peace now blanketing them, she turns back to her fool-- Max and nods to him. He looks drawn, pale, exhausted beyond reckoning, but his eyes are bright with something she couldn't begin to contemplate now. “I think you should listen--" She takes a great, wheezy breath, "listen to Vyrie.”

He ignores her. “How’s your breathing?”

“Tight. Rough. Hurts.”

He nods, understanding something she didn’t. He lifts himself up, stepping gingerly over her and stripping off his jacket and associated effects. He lowers himself beside her clumsily, as if he may have been a bit dizzy. He hums as he wedges a hand under her shoulderblades. She gets the message and attempts to lift herself up, a blast of pain coursing through her with the effort. He stops immediately, face writ with panic, as if he had been the one to hurt her and he couldn’t bear it. She shakes her head dismissively, continuing her progress.

When she is finally upright, he lowers her head on his shoulder with a soft hand, supports her back with his right arm, palm curling over her hip. She melts into him, the touch more comforting than the slide of gears and the heat of engines. He pulls a blanket from the corner beside him, spreading it out haphazardly, one handed, over her. She hasn't the strength or will to aid him. She simply breathes, her chest opening slightly with the new angle, and revels in his warmth. He finally reaches his right hand out, the hand that had been holding her hip, to catch an elusive corner of the blanket, pressing her more fully into the circle of his arms and she hisses in a breath. He freezes, and she shakes her head, groggy with bone-deep fatigue, and presses her head into his throat.

They stay like for a moment, and she feels him draw warm lines of comfort over the muscles in her neck. She thinks maybe this is what love could feel like, if such a thing could grow in this world.

She's pulled from the margins of sleep by the scrape of metal on metal and his mumbled "Almost forgot."

She peels open her good eye to see a canteen held before her.

"Want me to...?"

"No... I can." She brings her hand up from his thigh, shaky and weak, and takes three long draws. "Fuck." The word leaves her mouth unbidden in the wake of the blissful slide of water curling in her belly. He smiles, small and soft, rare like rain. She would do just about anything to see it again.

"Sleep." He says, brushing fingers over her scalp, and she needs no more encouragement.

+++

Dag watches them.

She grew up watching, in some half-remembered trash heap of a home that was now, no doubt, a pile of rubble emblazoned in the sand. _"Odd thing,"_ Her mother used to say as if she weren't there, _"Hardly ever speaks."_

Dag had learned, through many beatings, that words held power, and never to waste them on frivolous matters. Words were for pain, for comfort, for strength. And when she found herself imprisoned in a menagerie for Joe's most precious treasures, her arts of observation paid itself over tenfold.

She had observed that Joe liked the quiet ones, so she spat and hissed like a hellcat. She had observed that Cheedo was beautiful and bright like a dragonfly, so she spread kisses over her brow and wiped sticky tracks of hot tears from her face. She had observed that Angharad wore the title of Joe's favorite like a medal, proudly and defiantly distracting him from the others, so she followed her with as much ardor as she had left in her, and drank in her words like a sweet wine. She had observed that Furiosa had a missing arm and a brand on her neck and burned and crackled like an ember, and so she threw her life in her War Rig like so much cargo.

And now, she observed that the world _could_ be healed. That men like Joe may have killed it, but men like Max could piece it back together again.

Men like Max and women like Furiosa.

She would learn to till soil and sweeten earth and fold dirt over seeds, but Furiosa could command with a look, kill with a twitch of her finger, climb over a car and rip the throat of their tormentor out with a hole in her side. She could also love in her own way. A fierce, biting love, like a coyote over a fallen mate.

And Max-- Max loves her. This bright, wild woman borne of burnt tires and hammered metal. Of verdant slopes and night music.

He probably doesn't know it. Or if he does, he is fighting against it with all the strength left in him, but he doesn’t have much of that remaining to him, she knows.

She remembers seeing a man sobbing wretchedly over the crumpled body of a child, when Joe had come for his tribute. She used to recall that memory often during her imprisonment, to remind her of how men should be. Lately though, she had come to think of it that image, made blurry and rough at the edges with time and ill-use, as nothing more than an illusion after years in Joe's clutches.

But now, she thinks about the fool's frantic, shaking hands, pulling the tubing straight and piercing his arm as if he couldn't bleed himself fast enough. She remembers her own breath, coming out in panicky bursts as she held up the line of blood, warming with life, and how it had matched his own. She recalls his name, like an incantation, escaping his lips as he held her, not to be parted from her until she awoke and repeated it back to him. It was a heavy, burdensome gift for him to give. Letting her and all the rest of them come away with a tiny, sharp sliver of him, razor-edged and hard-won.

And as he carefully removes the needles binding them, she watches as his hands press gauze over the wound in her arm, soft but firm, paying no heed to the blood seeping out of his own.

She leans forward and moves a hand over his, pressing for him. He seems startled, not knowing she was awake, but pushes it down quickly for the sake of the woman leaning against him. "Thanks," he grunts, low and careful.

After Furiosa’s wound is dressed, he struggles for a moment with a strip of cloth for his own arm. "Let me," she whispers.

He hesitates for a moment, but nods, holding his arm out for her as she wraps the cloth firmly, tying it off. "There."

He looks pale and a bit sweaty and she thinks maybe the blood loss is finally settling in. He lays his shoulders against the wall of the car, bringing his right arm more securely around Furiosa. She groans a bit, snaking her hand up his chest to curl in the collar of his shirt. He leans his head against the window and _breathes_ like it’s the first breath he has ever taken and the taste of oxygen is too much to bear.

Dag settles back down, committing the image to memory. Etching it carefully it into her mind so she may never again forget the kindness in the world.

And Max is the one to give this to her, and she thinks maybe she loves him too.

+++

It's not long enough, he thinks. Not long enough to have her so warm and real and vital beside him.

Because he knows he cannot stay. He cannot be in a Green Place. He is a dust devil, a hellion, a feral thing bound to heaping dunes and ochre cliffs and the old Vuvalini is cheering from the driver’s seat upon the first glimpse of the Citadel swimming on the horizon. But he thinks that maybe he could stay in this car with her just a while longer.

He blinks the chains of sleep from his eyes, unable to remember how exactly to do it. Sleep was a trap for him, something to spring from like a newly opened cage, not to reluctantly push away.

His cheek prickles from her hair as he lifts his head and he finds the others pulling themselves into various states of wakefulness.

Furiosa stirs last, upon his gentle jostle. "Hey," he whispers, "almost there."

She groans, pain edging into her breath. He lifts her up so she may be free of him, but she just sags into his hands and he lets her fall into him once more.

"Sleep well?" Capable asks her gently, reaching to stroke Fuirosa’s arm from over the back of the seat.

"Tired... hurts," She grits out and Max needs, _burns_ , to do something to wipe that away, but he can only brush a hand over her hair.

"We need to think of seating arrangements," the other Vuvalini calls from her nest in the back. "We need Furiosa up front."

"She can't move over the seats!" Cheedo protests, but Furiosa holds up her hand.

"I can do it. Max--" She winces as she finally pulls herself up on her one hand. "Help me."

The Vuvalini jams the throttle, sliding over the seat, holding the wheel steady. Max carefully picks his way over Furiosa. Toast scrambles to the back, supporting Furiosa by the shoulders as she helps her towards the front.

Max grips her hands as she haltingly steps over the seat, hissing in breaths and stifling groans. He holds her by her ribcage as she sinks in beside him. When she is safely settled, he turns to the road, glad of the distraction.

He feels her warmth again, draped on his arm, his shoulder, pressed to the side of his thigh. She's back asleep in a few short breaths, the effort of motion sapping what little strength she had left. Cheedo, now seated next to her, strokes her back lovingly and lays her head between her shoulderblades.

And he thinks, as he stares at those spires in the distance, that maybe this is what home would feel like, if such a thing could actually be in this world.

+++

_The cities we passed were a flickering wasteland,_  
_but his hand, in my hand, made them hale and harmless._

_\-- "Only Skin"_ Joanna Newsom

**Author's Note:**

> So this was inspired by many frantic Tumblr posts. I know at least two stories have already been written about this, and they are both beautiful, but I just had to get my fingers into this one. 
> 
> Once again, thank you so so much to the lovely [bethagain](http://archiveofourown.org/users/bethagain/pseuds/bethagain) for stunt-reading for me. She keeps me honest. :)
> 
> The title is from the Joanna Newsom song "Only Skin".


End file.
